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The Direction Of ATI Radeon Graphics In Ubuntu 11.04

Phoronix: The Direction Of ATI Radeon Graphics In Ubuntu 11.04

With Ubuntu 11.04 arriving in a little more than a month, the key packages to be found in this "Natty Narwhal" release are nearly settled. For those concerned about the open-source ATI graphics stack, the packages to note are the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, Mesa 7.10.1, and xf86-video-ati 6.14.0. What does this mean for the conventional user? This article provides a brief look at the state of open-source ATI in Ubuntu 11.04.

Right now there is no publicly released Catalyst driver that supports the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and X.Org Server 1.10 as used by Ubuntu 11.04, but this will come with the Catalyst 10.3 or 10.4 releases. If the necessary kernel/xorg-server support does not arrive in this month's Catalyst 10.3 release, AMD once again will be seeding Canonical with a pre-release of Catalyst 10.4 to provide the necessary binary driver support before the Ubuntu 11.04 Beta.

"We are testing how fast the ati driver is but we are not testing how fast it really is, only how fast it is as default.."?

I happen to have the HD 4670 and I have an Athlon II 240.
I use Archlinux and git versions of mesa, xf86-video-ati and the drm-radeon-testing branch of the kernel, all build on 20110306.
I have color tiling and page flipping enabled.

Does 1680x1050 to 1920x1200 cause 30% performance drop in Urban Terror or is it only color tiling and page flipping?

I also don't understand the nexuiz result. On the "middle"-preset for the effects I get between 60 and 90 fps constantly.
Just saying, the statement should maybe a bit weaker than "Ubuntu 10.10 does not produce a playable frame-rate for the Radeon HD 4670 graphics card on the open-source drivers". Especially the second "Shadow"-Option in the effects-pane seems to have a huge impact on performance (on ultra settings with = 2 fps, without = 20-40 fps).

The benchmark is flawed. He's running the the opensource drivers with SwapBuffersWait on, for maximum fps it must be turned off. It's like having a street car race where one car (radeon) stops for every red light while the other one (fglrx) just ignores them. Of course the car which ignores the red lights is going to win (or crash..).

Not that Catalyst wouldn't have a higher fps anyway but this is not a fair comparison on is not showing the real performance improvements of the oss drivers.

The benchmark is flawed. He's running the the opensource drivers with SwapBuffersWait on, for maximum fps it must be turned off. It's like having a street car race where one car (radeon) stops for every red light while the other one (fglrx) just ignores them. Of course the car which ignores the red lights is going to win (or crash..).

Not that Catalyst wouldn't have a higher fps anyway but this is not a fair comparison on is not showing the real performance improvements of the oss drivers.

At the same time then is the Catalyst driver results not fair because Catalyst AI is not manually set to the highest level by default, etc. Testing at the defaults is done for a reason. It's the developers that choose the defaults.

The benchmark is flawed. He's running the the opensource drivers with SwapBuffersWait on, for maximum fps it must be turned off. It's like having a street car race where one car (radeon) stops for every red light while the other one (fglrx) just ignores them. Of course the car which ignores the red lights is going to win (or crash..).

Not that Catalyst wouldn't have a higher fps anyway but this is not a fair comparison on is not showing the real performance improvements of the oss drivers.

The benchmark is good. Those are the defaults. This benchmark is only about the default drivers on Ubuntu. Users don't know stuff about swapbuffers and whatnot. They simply use the stuff at the recommended defaults supplied by Canonical.